Hi everyone, my name is Joe Brewer and today I want to share with you some of my observations about the problematic framing of the climate discourse.
Now some of you may remember that a long time ago in my life I worked with George Lakeoff and helped to extend his understandings of cognitive linguistics and frame analysis to work with social movements around the world and that I did a lot of frame analysis around the sustainable development goals and what’s wrong with them and around basic economic ideas, the framing of global warming and various other topics, things that I wrote about quite extensively, roughly between the years of 2007 and around 2016.
I haven’t been doing the work in that way in a long time. I’ve instead been helping to build movements and apply what I’ve learned in real-world practice. But today I feel like sharing with you some of my observations as a frame analyst, as someone who analyzes semantic frames and how they structure a discourse to, in this case, to disempower us and keep us embedded within a conversation that is primarily about the actions of corporations and nation-states and that disengages us from direct grassroots action and taking power into our own hands.
I’m not going to be extensive and tell everything that I see in the climate discourse, but I want to touch on a few major framing elements. One framing element of the climate discourse that you’ve probably noticed is that it’s primarily about elite institutions and their responses. This is when the media tells us that we should pay attention to the COP meetings or to what’s happening with international agreements or what’s happening with presidential elections, because there’s an idea that dealing with climate change is an issue for our institutions. Whereas you can see by clear evidence that our institutions have a track record of completely failing to address climate change at all levels throughout the entire history of the climate discourse.
So why is it that after social movements like Occupy Wall Street or Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter or what happened with the Keystone Pipeline protests and what happened with La Via Campesina in Latin America and similar kinds of social movements, why is it that we’re not focusing on those movements as the source of our strength and our organizing? It’s because we have a discourse framed around elite policy institutions that make them the primary actors and the coordination of mostly market mechanisms, which leads to the second thing.
Almost all of the climate discourse is framed in terms of economic transactions with carbon markets and carbon credits and carbon offsets and the market dynamics associated with them or with technology solutions that corporations can implement. Part of the disingenuous framing of this is that because corporations are major polluters, the idea is that the polluters are where the problem and solution are, which leads to another framing insight, which is that the framing of climate change is a problem with a solution instead of framing it as a systemic interdependent web or what’s called a predicament.
A predicament is a situation where, as you try to solve problems, you lack a holistic understanding because you’ve been reductionistic and ignored parts of the interdependencies and you end up creating other problems. The attempt to create a solution creates other problems because of the interdependencies. So framing climate change as a problem with solutions instead of as a predicament that we have to manage and navigate is already another problematic framing.
But then let’s talk about how the climate discourse became trapped in atmospheric chemistry and how it became trapped in a myopic focus on carbon dioxide molecules. Instead of looking at the self-regulating dynamics of the Earth’s climate, which is a combination of ocean circulation, plate tectonics and the formation of mountains and these other kinds of carbon cycle dynamics, which occur generally on much longer time scales, and the real action, which is small water cycles and ecological processes in the biosphere, that most of the regulation of the Earth is through the biosphere on short timeframes.
Yes, if you wait a million years, the grinding down of mountains will reduce carbon dioxide, which is what happened after major carbon explosions into the atmosphere in previous times. But the reason that we are not regulating the Earth’s climate in a healthy way now is because we’re not working with the most powerful short-term immediate interactive dynamics, which are the living systems themselves. Notice how the climate discourse tends to focus on carbon dioxide molecules and then they might say mangroves are good for carbon sequestration. Instead of, well, what if we just restored ecosystems and we focused on the restoration of ecosystems and we started to see the connectivity between things like evapotranspiration, which is the perspiration and the metabolism of plants through leaves, that can shape how air pressure is altered and can shape how water moves across the landscape. And the stabilizing of regional climate is mostly a matter of healthy intact ecosystems.
A lot of the work of restoring the Earth’s climate could be done through ecosystem restoration, which requires local organizing, grassroots processes, money to flow into the hands of local community groups. Usually these community groups are not institutional and they’re not operating at the national or international scale. And just like an international development where 95 to 99 percent of the money goes to intermediaries and doesn’t get to people on the ground, the same is true that money for climate solutions, because of the misplaced framing of problems, actually go to corporations or to people that are buying and selling in the carbon markets and similar kinds of things. Instead of supporting ecosystem restoration, regenerative schools for children, bringing land into the commons so that there can be public goods in which local municipalities and local community groups can work, that the focus could and should be on grassroots organizing.
But it’s not because it’s framed around elite policymaking of institutions at the scale of national, international and multinational corporations and the agreements that they make with each other. And this is shifting focus away from the fact that most of the disempowerment we feel is because those same institutions have been captured by plutocrats, by the wealth hoarding financial elites, which is exactly what all those social movements I named were struggling against.
And so there’s a parallel that a major part of the failure of our policy discourse is a failure to see that our global economic system is specifically designed to create inequality, poverty and the hoarding of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. And that elite can capture institutions by taking the money, buying politicians, buying policy outcomes and so on, which is exactly what happens and has been happening for decades.
So here you can see that we need to reframe away from climate change and reframe toward ecological crisis or ecological collapse, focus on ecosystems. We need to focus our energy on grassroots organizing and local efforts to restore the health of ecosystems, which does change economics, it does change politics, does change all those things, but it changes it through the local coordination of actions to do things like restore a watershed, restore a local fishery, restore an ecological corridor for the migration of animals, restore a local water cycle through reforestation and watershed restoration work.
And this reveals that the actual work is the work of Earth Regeneration, of regenerating the earth’s capacities to regulate itself, which is done primarily on the timescales that we care about, primarily through the biosphere, which means the entire discourse should be around how biodiversity, healthy soils, intact ecosystems, changing land practices back to the restoration of these healthy ecosystems is the basis of regenerative economies, the basis of local authority and local action, the basis of a different kind of politics, and that this is not being talked about in the policy discourse because it’s been framed in the ways that I described.
So I want to share this with you to start giving you some glimpses into how the climate discourse is framed to keep us from taking action because like I’m doing here, I’m in Barichara, Colombia in a community forest called Bioparque Móncora and I’m helping restore the forest and supporting education of children as they learn reforestation and watershed restoration techniques, which is also changing local culture, changing local economic interactions, revealing that the food forests like this one behind me, this is a syntropic agriculture system, could become a model for a different kind of economy to grow food, medicine, textiles, construction materials, all the different things we need in this tropical environment can grow in a forest or an agroforestry system like the one behind me, which does not need international corporations, does not need advanced technology, and does not need plutocrats and billionaires.
It needs local people with local knowledge and access to land. And so you see that this relates also to bringing land back to people, to restoring people who have been displaced from their ancestral lands, which obviously relates to Indigenous cultures around the world in various ways. When you start to see that our conversation would be very, very different if we solve the climate problem by focusing on the systemic patterns of regenerating ecosystems.
And so that’s what I want to show you today on how to correct the framing of the climate systems. If you’d like to get involved in actually doing this, you can join us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth, where we help people to do this all over the world and help them coordinate local financial flows and decision making into their own communities.
We’re doing this through the Earth Regeneration Fund, which supports all of those activities, and we’re doing it through telling the Story of Bioregional Earth, so you have several ways to get involved. Come help us regenerate the Earth.
(This text is the transcript of a video recording that you can find here.)
Joe Brewer is co-founder of the Design School for Regnerating Earth as well as a co-founder of Barichara Regenerativa. You can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram and support his work directly on Patreon.
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